Prime Minister David Cameron’s target of a third of his ministers being female
risks a 'tokenism’ reshuffle

Opposition leaders are a bit like teenagers: they think they’re so very original and countercultural. Occasionally they don baseball caps so they can look like adolescents too – but fortunately for all concerned, that’s pretty rare. Still, what they all do is make the same promise about improving Parliament.

This normally involves a sermon on “forging a new politics”, but there’s often also an attempt to say something about improving the standing of women in Westminster. When David Cameron went through this phase in opposition, he promised that a third of his ministers would be female. But in power he discovered that he had to reach that quota with a party where only 16 per cent of MPs were women. The current ministerial cohort is only 14 per cent female.

This week we saw the inevitable result of making wild but well-meaning pledges about promoting women. Alan Duncan, the international development minister, decided that, as the first openly gay Tory MP, he had a special authority to warn the Prime Minister against promoting “token” females in this autumn’s reshuffle. “Nobody should want to be a token woman,” he told the FT. “It should all be based on merit.”

Sadly, it is difficult to find many MPs who really believe merit is the Prime Minister’s only consideration as he plans his new team. Tory gossips regularly predict that a “reshuffle for women” is approaching. The men shake their heads a little as they say this – not because they resent their female colleagues doing well, but because they suspect anyone pale and male has little chance of success.

Fortunately for Mr Cameron, he doesn’t need to appoint “token” women: the Tory party might not be heavy on the ladies, but the female MPs that do exist are bursting with talent. If you want to sound informed, you could easily pick a name at random from the list of women still on the backbenches and predict that they were ripe for promotion. A reasonable bet would be that Margot James, Harriett Baldwin, Nicola Blackwood, Karen Bradley, Amber Rudd, Claire Perry, Priti Patel, Nicky Morgan, Tracey Crouch, Charlotte Leslie and Andrea Leadsom are all names circulating in Mr Cameron’s head as he plans the promotions. Smart money would go on a new job for Nicky Morgan, currently in the Whip’s Office but very well respected by the leadership.

All those women deserve a promotion on their merits alone, so the Prime Minister could quite easily avoid the “token women” charge. The problem is that he has in the past panicked and given a good woman a bad role. Chloe Smith was shoehorned into the wrong job at the Treasury, after the PM apparently mistook the former management consultant for an accountant. It seemed Mr Cameron had thought “Aha, a woman!” and promoted Miss Smith regardless of whether she would shine as economic secretary to the Treasury. She didn’t, and now appears much happier at the Cabinet Office.

Preachy Labour made hay over the last reshuffle, when three ministers reportedly cried as they were given the axe. The (mistaken) assumption was that the criers were all female, which added to the impression of a women problem. Incidentally, the only parliamentarian I’ve ever seen cry was a man, but that’s a story for another day.

Perhaps Mr Cameron will panic in September that Labour will attack him again if he sacks certain underperforming female ministers. A number of “innocents” – ministers of state who are doing a good job but may be moved to give others a chance – are known to be vulnerable, and the names circulating are all male. But the gossip is also that while justice minister Helen Grant is rumoured to be struggling with her portfolio, she won’t get demoted. “You can’t demote Helen, can you?” one close colleague of the PM remarked to me recently. Why not? “Well, she’s a woman. It would look terrible.”

Mr Cameron might think Mrs Grant is doing an excellent job. But if he doesn’t, he should sack her. To keep a minister he knows isn’t much cop in the post just because it would look bad not to, while sacking male ministers who haven’t done anything wrong, would be to affect the smooth running of government.

But the real issue with any target is that even if the Prime Minister did manage to meet it by hook or by crook, using more female peers and drawing on the Lib Dems – who have a magnificent seven women in the Commons, two of them already ministers and another, Sarah Teather, an ex-minister – it would mask the real failings lower down. Just as setting quotas on boards won’t improve wider female representation in business, promoting all the women you can find into government won’t make any difference to the fact that your party can only muster 47 female MPs from a total of 302.

A group of Conservative women recently published a report arguing that the way to improve gender balance in business was not through quotas, but by improving the supply of women at lower levels. The Tories have noted that argument, and more than a quarter of their 2015 candidates are women.

So if you want a really sound reshuffle bet, rather than putting money on who will get a job, you should bet on the PM falling short of his 30 per cent target for female ministers. As Alan Duncan said, missing that, and accepting that there is a wider women problem, is better than causing a “token women” problem by a rash pledge.